Program Notes for Concert III - April 24th, 2010

This program spotlights works of some of the undisputed musical giants of the 20th century, from choral specialists to those who wrote just a handful of choral works. Sacred or secular, exultant or reverent, and quite international, all of these pieces paint vivid colors and images in the varying tonal languages of the past century, a period that still leaves us scrambling for words to describe its vast riches.

 

          Debussy — Trois Chansons 

The Trois Chansons on texts by medieval poet Charles d'Orléans are essentially the only stand-alone choral music ever written by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). The first and third pieces were written in 1898, and the second was written 10 years later. From the first few measures, Debussy's unique musical language is immediately recognizable. It incorporates blue notes reminiscent of jazz, and it sounds idiomatic and comfortable in a genre in which the composer had no experience. In the second piece, the soloist narrates while the other parts make tambourine sounds. The third piece might be a fitting civic anthem for Washington this year amid all our snowfall, and Debussy confronts the poem deftly and with good humor. What a different musical landscape we might have today had Debussy continued to write for choirs.

 

Schoenberg — Friede auf Erden 

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is mostly known as the father of atonal expressionism, a movement in music history that frankly terrifies many lay listeners. No one, however, needs a music degree to appreciate Friede auf Erden. The piece dates from the early part of Schoenberg's career (written in 1907, premiered in 1911), and in it Schoenberg uses a late Romantic idiom in a landscape of expanded tonality. Schoenberg saw his work at the time as a natural progression from the tradition of Brahms and Mendelssohn, not very different from the direction in which the music of Mahler and Strauss (whose music he had recently been studying) was leading. Indeed, the strophic structure of the piece and the highly chromatic but tonal language place it well within that tradition. The piece features almost constant harmonic rhythm; even the slower, calmer phrases never cease their movement. The intense chromaticism at once builds upon our expectations and deceives our ears as to where the music is headed. One might draw an unlikely comparison between this piece and the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber (whose music is also on this program) in that the constant striving finds some points of near-resolution but never really resolves with complete satisfaction. Schoenberg uses stark, violent text-painting, especially in the second verse. The result is an excruciatingly beautiful meditation of the 1886 poem by Swiss realist writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer with a message similar to the Christmas carol "It came upon the midnight clear": that the peaceful song of the angels at the birth of Jesus Christ (also heard in the Gloria movement of Stravinsky's Mass, "et in terra pax”) still has meaning and relevance despite centuries of earthly strife. The striving continues through the third line of the fourth stanza, "Waffen schmieden ohne Fährde," when the music breaks into beauty and stillness, like the sun coming out after a storm. It leaves the listener with a sense of hope.

 

Stravinsky - Mass 

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), though his music is well-known and widely performed, remains an enigmatic figure because of his varying styles and the periods of time he spent in various countries. Despite this, anyone who knows one piece by Stravinsky can immediately recognize another one, no matter when he wrote it. Though he created works in many genres, Stravinsky never deviated from his roots as a composer for the stage; his father was an opera star, and Stravinsky's first major successes as a composer came as a result of his ballet collaboration with Diaghilev in Paris, beginning with The Firebird. As far as we know, tonight's performance represents the first choreographing of his Mass.

 

Choreographing Mass: Cantate Music Director Gisèle Becker states: "Ever since my first encounter with Stravinsky's Mass as an undergraduate student, I have always seen and sensed it as an internal 'dance.' As with much music I learn and perform, a visual image is important in my intuiting and interpreting what the composer wrote. In the case of Stravinsky, where interpretation is somewhat taboo, including dance adds a dimension that I hope will expand appreciation of the work for audience and performers alike."

 

Choreographer Lucy Bowen McCauley says: "What a gorgeous work this Mass is! I have purposely not tried to create a storyline but rather to capture, in motion, the rich atmosphere of solemnity and reverence that I hear in the music. The drama inherent in the liturgical texts nudges the piece toward the divine while Stravinsky's music evokes human longing. That tension is the crux of this work. Having just lost a third mentor, the brilliant choreographer Daniel West, I dedicate this dance to him."

 

Mass in context: There is no doubt that solemnity and reverence are the dominant forces in this music. Stravinsky, perpetually in a state of financial insecurity, seems to have begun Mass around 1944 without any financial motivation other than that he hoped it eventually would become a frequently performed work in Roman Catholic churches. The sparse scoring and the voicing for trebles, tenor, and bass (as opposed to SATB voicing) is typical of Roman Catholic choirs of the time, and the composer hoped the work would be accessible enough to make it marketable. This rare personal project was one of few works he began without a commission or promise of compensation. Perhaps the work came out of a sense of longing for ritual and stability; Stravinsky had relocated from Paris to Los Angeles because of growing European xenophobia and an environment in which he felt edged out by younger composers. Stravinsky found the Los Angeles social scene difficult to break into, retreating into circles of fellow Russian émigrés and speaking almost exclusively Russian, even several years after moving there. The music scene was equally unkind, and Stravinsky's handful of attempts to break into film and commercial music were largely unsuccessful because of his reluctance to conform to industry standards of accessibility. (Incidentally, he and Schoenberg lived in Los Angeles at the same time, and legend has it that they hated each other so much that at a concert on which both had works performed, they sat on opposite sides of the concert hall and had to be escorted out separately.)

 

Stravinsky completed Mass in 1948, and it was premiered in Milan in October. He was unable to travel to the premiere, one of several premieres he missed due to financial constraints and his active touring and conducting schedule. The work uses an octatonic scale, which omits some chord tones essential to traditional harmonies. The result is a typical Stravinskian soundscape that leads the ear to cadences that go to unexpected places, in a way that is at once like Schoenberg and very, very different. Mass is based on musical ideas of the Russian Orthodox liturgy, and it is likely that Stravinsky would have preferred to set that instead of the Latin mass, but instruments were forbidden in Russian Orthodox churches.

 

The music of Mass: Stravinsky uses broad brush strokes, emphasizing not the meaning of every word but rather the meaning of each section as a whole. The word stress is not always traditional; it instead emphasizes the rhythm of the phonemes and uses the consonants as a sort of percussion in his sparse chamber orchestration. Throughout the work, instruments and voices are used almost interchangeably, trading roles of melody and accompaniment in a way reminiscent of the Venetian polychoral style that Stravinsky had recently been studying. A characteristic of his musical language evident in the Kyrie is that phrases begin with active rhythms and end in long, sustained notes. In the Gloria, melodies play within steps of each other while maintaining independence, beginning with the beautiful sonority of two solo voices and solo oboe, English horn, and bassoon. The Orthodox choral tradition on which this movement is based is evident: in some sections, alto and bass chant while tenor and soprano drone on open intervals. The Credo recalls a congregational chant, completely homophonic throughout with the exception of melodic ornaments, another sound typical of Russian music. In the beginning of the Sanctus, the song of the seraphim is punctuated with choral outbursts. The Pleni sunt coeli section has a light trombone underscoring, while the voices sing in somewhat complex rhythms, with the big beats remaining as a solid rhythmic underpinning. Hosannas are flung about exuberantly. The Agnus Dei is the only movement with unaccompanied choral sections. These alternate throughout with instruments, and the voices and instruments are never heard together. This final movement of Mass is calm and meditative, a traditional treatment of the Agnus Dei.

 

Samuel Barber — Reincarnations 

Most of the choral music of Samuel Barber (1910-1981) consists of arrangements of his other compositions. This collection includes arrangements of solo songs as well as the Agnus Dei, a reworking of the Adagio for Strings (possibly the most well known piece of American music of all time). Barber's complete choral works fill fewer than 130 pages of music in a single volume. It is indeed a shame that we do not have more choral music from this American master of evocative text-setting. The title Reincarnations comes from the 1918 poetry collection by James Stephens, and these three poems (which Barber set from 1937 to 1940) are Stephens' translations from the Irish of works by the legendary blind poet Anthony Raftery. They are immediate and beautiful love songs that cause the listener to fall in love with the subject of each song. "Mary Hynes" alternates between homophonic and fugal sections, all the time keeping rhythmic interest. In "Anthony O'Daly" the pedal point in the bass part underscores the lament, but Barber then transfers that gesture to the sopranos and altos in octaves, painting a picture of corporate mourning for the lost hero. "The Coolin" (meaning "The Fair-Haired One" — Stephens spells it "The Coolun") is a highly intimate portrait of a date in the country, so lush and romantic that the listener is led to want to leave the happy couple alone.

 

Benjamin Britten — Five Flower Songs 

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) is well-respected for his choral music, from the oft-performed A Ceremony of Carols to the massive War Requiem for chorus and orchestra. The Five Flower Songs are settings of texts by various poets and date from 1950. They are partsongs, even marketed to high school choirs in this pre-Beatles era as "popular songs." The first two poems are two of only three Britten settings of poems by Robert Herrick. The setting of "To Daffodils" is light-hearted; Britten seems to emphasize the pleasures of the brief spring over the darker comparison to the brevity of human life. There are rarely more than two parts singing together, but in the second half the basses break completely from the rest of the chorus, imploring the flowers to stay, while the upper voices meditate on the human condition. In "The Succession of the Four Sweet Months," each voice part adopts a month (listen carefully for the basses' July or you might miss it). This is classic Britten choral writing, the melody and text delegated to one voice part while the others meditate softly with fragments of text and music from their previous phrases. It is beautiful and believable. "Marsh Flowers" is a setting of verses from George Crabbe's The Borough, an epic poem that had been the basis of the libretto for Britten's opera Peter Grimes five years earlier. Crabbe describes the weeds and nastier things that grow in the salt marshes of East Suffolk, and Britten creates a sort of tongue-in-cheek ode to them. John Clare's sonnet "The Evening Primrose" (published in 1835 in a collection called The Rural Muse) is beautifully treated, with homophonic passages interspersed with imitative ones, ending with an open fifth on the word "gone." The set finishes with a jaunty tale by an anonymous poet. "Ballad of Green Broom" tosses the melody from the tenors to the basses to the sopranos to the altos, with everyone else singing "green broom." The set is dedicated “To Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst on the occasion of their twenty-fifth Wedding Anniversary — 3rd April 1950.” The Elmhirsts were generous patrons of Britten's, and he dedicated these pieces to them because he knew them to be amateur botanists.

 

Copyright 2010 Rachel E. Barham